Recently, hand-wringing at technology giant Apple reached a frenzied state, as the corporation’s management fretted over the “diversity” of its employees. Apple CEO Tim Cook, quoted by The Register, said, “I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They’re not new to us, and we’ve been working hard for quite some time to improve them. … We are making progress, and we’re committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products.” The heinous shame with which Apple is only now struggling to come to grips is that its workforce is slightly more than half white.

That’s right: Apple’s workforce is 55 percent Caucasian, 15 percent Asian, 11 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent black. This differs only slightly from the racial breakdown of the United States, which is roughly 78 percent Caucasian, 5 percent Asian, 17 percent Hispanic and 13 percent black. Much more troubling for Apple seems to be the realization that two-thirds of its workforce is male and only one-third of its employees is female. Most of the women at Apple work “non-tech” jobs.

“The figures put Apple in line with many of the other big names in tech, in terms of diversity,” writes Shaun Nichols. “Google, Yahoo, and Twitter published reports with similar numbers that indicate a dearth of women in technology and key leadership roles.”

Adrienne Lafrance of The Atlantic points out that little has changed over the last decade and more. “HP has made its diversity data publicly available for more than a decade. In 2002 … just under 30 percent of HP’s worldwide employees were women.”

“It has become a grand gesture in tech this summer for big companies to release demographic data about their workforces,” she goes on. “This drumbeat of diversity data has been anticlimactic, not least because it shows what most people already expected: that leaders in technology are overwhelmingly hiring white men. Often, when companies offered more granular detail, the gender divide was even more pronounced. Company-wide representation of women might be 30 percent, but the percentage of women in tech and engineering roles at Google and Yahoo, for instance, was about half that.”

This infantile notion that the ethnic and gender makeup of any given workplace, particularly those workplaces liberals have decided are especially deserving of their ignorant attentions (STEM jobs – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – are and always have been predominantly male, which liberal sensibilities cannot abide), is typical of left-wing sociopolitical meddling. To the liberal mind, it cannot possibly be that a given cultural group or ethnic demographic places more or less importance, culturally and systemically, on a given vocation.

No, if women or blacks, or black women, or transgendered black women, or transgendered superqueer anti-patriarchal grrrl-empowered differently abled wymyn, don’t turn up in every field of human endeavor at a rate exactly matching their statistical occurrence in the population overall, it must be misogyny. It must be cultural microaggressions. It must be patriarchy and sexism and the good ol’ boys club and the glass ceiling. It can’t be anything else (such as the individual choices and efforts of the individuals involved).

Can it?

On July 2, 2014, if you read this column, you read these words: “Why, imagine that: Technology is still largely the purview of the skilled white males who invented so much of it – you know, the people at the heart of ‘nerd culture,’ the people women in general and feminists in particular have always been so quick to sneer at when such would-be suitors come calling. One reason for this might be that women … abandon so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) jobs within months of starting their careers [emphasis added]. Most often this is to – gasp – have and care for children, you know, voluntarily. Women make up nearly half those graduating with technology and engineering degrees, but Strasser insists on seeing some kind of persistent discrimination at the heart of women’s subsequent under-representation in the technology field.”

In other words, women – who actually outnumber men in college and generally outpace them in education overall, earning more college degrees than their male counterparts – go to school for technology jobs at roughly the rate of their representation in society. Once in those jobs, their priorities differ from those of men.

In the liberal mind, this is a hate crime.

The “problem” of sexism in the tech sector is wholly one of liberal invention. It is the hysteria of people who talk in made-up language through emotionally loaded doublespeak like “cisgender,” “patriarchy,” “trigger warning” and “rape culture.” This left-wing gobbledygook builds a world of fantasy around the liberal, insulating him or her from realities the liberal does not like, transferring blame for liberals’ choices and failures on to everyone else. The favored target of liberal scapegoating will always be white males. In the liberal mind, to be white and to possess male genitalia is to be born evil, to spring from the womb a fully formed sexual predator and oppressor whose only goal is to keep down anyone who does not look exactly like him.

This much-hated demographic, whether in the tech sector or within society at large, is the very same swath of the voting public that President Obama famously gave up on courting during his elections – because employed white people don’t like him. Obama, in turn, hates white people, and white people with jobs most of all, as evidenced by his relentless taunting, vilifying and frequently expressed hatred of whites and for business owners. “You didn’t build that,” he famously sneered, but if he were to revisit those comments today, he would add, “And you didn’t employ enough women when you weren’t building it.”

Leftists, those champions of diversity for diversity’s sake, are remarkably consistent. When confronted with any condition of reality that does not meet their twisted notion of what our society should be, they will always look for a convenient enemy. In the case of the technology sector, leftists see demographic disparities as evidence of prejudice and mistreatment. Typically, their search for someone to blame goes no farther than the nearest white man.